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What if the city ran Waze and you had to obey it? Could this cure congestion?

I believe we have the potential to eliminate a major fraction of traffic congestion in the near future,
using technology that exists today which will be cheap in the future. The method has
been outlined by myself and others in the past, but here I offer an alternate way to
explain it which may help crystallize it in people's minds.

Today many people drive almost all the time guided by their smartphone, using navigation
apps like Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze (now owned by Google.) Many have come to
drive as though they were a robot under the command of the app, trusting and obeying it
at every turn. Tools like these apps are even causing controversy, because in the hunt
for the quickest trip, they are often finding creative routes that bypass congested
major roads for local streets that used to be lightly used.

Put simply, the answer to traffic congestion might be, "What if you, by law, had to
obey your navigation app at rush hour?" To be more specific, what if the cities and towns that own
the streets handed out reservations for routes on those streets to you via those apps, and
your navigation app directed you
down them? And what if the cities made sure there were never more cars put on a piece of road
than it had capacity to handle? (The city would not literally run Waze, it would hand out route reservations to it, and Waze would still do the UI and be a private company.)

The value is huge. Estimates suggest congestion costs around 160 billion dollars per year in the USA, including 3 billion gallons of fuel and 42 hours of time for
every driver. Roughly quadruple that for the world.

Road metering actually works

This approach would exploit one principle in road management that's been most effective
in reducing congestion, namely road metering. The majority of traffic congestion is caused,
no surprise, by excess traffic -- more cars trying to use a stretch of road than it has the capacity
to handle. There are other things that cause congestion -- accidents, gridlock and
irrational driver behaviour, but even these only cause traffic jams when the road is near
or over capacity.

Today, in many cities, highway metering is keeping the highways flowing far better than they
used to. When highways stall, the metering lights stop cars from entering the freeway as
fast as they want. You get frustrated waiting at the metering light but the reward is you
eventually get on a freeway that's not as badly overloaded.

Another type of metering is called congestion pricing. Pioneered in Singapore, these
systems place a toll on driving in the most congested areas, typically the downtown cores
at rush hour. They are also used in London, Milan, Stockholm and some smaller towns, but have never caught on in many
other areas for political reasons. Congestion charging can easily be viewed as allocating
the roads to the rich when they were paid for by everybody's taxes.

A third successful metering system is the High-occupancy toll lane. HOT lanes take
carpool lanes that are being underutilized, and let drivers pay a market-based price to use them
solo. The price is set to bring in just enough solo drivers to avoid wasting the spare
capacity of the lane without overloading it. Taking those solo drivers out of the other
lanes improves their flow as well. While not every city will admit it, carpool lanes themselves
have not been a success. 90% of the carpools in them are families or others who would have
carpooled anyway. The 10% "induced" carpools are great, but if the carpool lane only runs at
50% capacity, it ends up causing more congestion than it saves. HOT is a metering system
that fixes that problem.

Metering works, but it's only used on freeways and a few downtown cores. To spread it to the
rest of the city, the smartphone is the answer. In many cities, smartphone penetration is
already extremely high, and it's forecast to get well above 90% by around 2020 in the USA.
It becomes practical soon to expect everybody to have a smartphone and data plan, or even to
consider simply subsidizing such a phone to everybody who does not have one. When you consider
the hundreds of billions of dollars congestion is calculated to cost, the price of this subsidy
is negligible.

Today, your navigation app looks at traffic data (often provided by other drivers running
the app driving all the roads) and finds you the fastest route to your destination. The
coordination is emergent rather than explicit -- a lot of other phones report they are taking
one road and the going is slow, so your phone suggests you take another. Even without being
universal, this is balancing traffic on the roads. The side streets which see extra traffic
are doing their job better, though the people who live on them don't like it, pushing the idea that
they have some ownership rights over those roads and they should not be used by non-local
traffic. At the same time, we have come to understand we actually have a lot of road capacity
which we don't use because there is no way to coordinate it.

In a metered world, your app doesn't just find a fast route, it would reserve a "slot" on it within
a system run by the city or other road authority. A slot allows you to drive that route over
a rough window of time. For example, it might reserve a slot for you to drive a particular
mile of highway between 8:20 and 8:25am, and a slot to drive the next section between 8:22 and 8:27.
If you've used tools like Waze, you have probably already become amazed at how good they are
at predicting your arrival time and when you will be on every stretch of road.

The city would hand out these slots, and quite simply not hand out more slots on a road
segment than it can handle. A typical freeway lane handles around 2,000 cars/hour in good
flow -- around one every 2 seconds. For this approach, after the reservation coordinator
has handed out a number just below that many slots, it hands out
no more, and instead hands out slots on other roads. The other routes are often longer or slower,
but they are almost guaranteed to be uncongested and so quite desirable compared to what
we have today.

Allocating the slots

To make this work, there are a few problems that need to be solved:

How does the city hand out routes on its roads to people in a way that not only is efficient and fair and beneficial, but seems that way, and can get political approval?

How can we be sure everybody, including visitors, has a working GPS phone with power and data plan, or a way to use this without those tools?

How do we handle the many exceptions people have, with emergencies and sudden detours and stops in a way that's simple and rarely gets in your way?

Preserving privacy and other basic rights.

The first hard problem is that there will be 3,000 people who want a slot on a highway that
only has the capacity for 2,000. How do we decide who gets one, and who has to take another
route? That's not an easy problem, but it's not hard to do better than what we have today.
Today, all 3,000 try to get on that road, and it collapses to stop-and-go traffic. Worse, once
it becomes stop and go, its capacity reduces even further, dropping down to 1,200 an hour or
worse. That heavy traffic pushes people onto other routes, or they sit and wait. Everybody loses.
Today, their phone app helps them find another route. In the past, it was the traffic helicopter, or
just the knowledge that commuters garner of what routes to avoid.

Markets

As these ideas are new, we don't know the best ways to allocate the slots. One of the most
obvious ones is money -- drivers bid, and the top bidders get the fastest routes. Markets are
powerful tools, and if not for the political problem that this makes the best roads mainly for the
wealthy or very hurried, this would probably be the best solution. In addition, it would help pay for the
roads, which is no small thing.

Lottery

A possible non-monetary methods is a lottery. That means some days you win and get the
fast route, and some days you don't. It's still a lot better than today, when everybody loses
and gets the slow route, especially in some cities.

Winning and losing may also mean being allocated a better start time. This only works when people
think about planning their trip in advance, which is reasonable for things like the morning
commute. This would allow you to know when your slot is the night before your commute, if you
are able to plan ahead.

Imagine that you need to be at work at 9am, and the trip takes 30 minutes in good traffic, but
in rush hour, it takes anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour. Right now, you just have to leave at
8am to be sure, and you usually get in by 8:45 and sometimes 9.
In the app world, when you win, you would get told, "You can leave at 8:30 tomorrow
morning, and get there at 9, so sleep in." If you "lose" you are told you will leave at 8am, but get there at 8:30.
Once again, everybody wins compared to what we have now -- some people just win more.

When demand is very high, or if you wait until your departure time to request a route, you might get
told there is no route that can make it. You're going to be late -- as is often the case with
traffic today, but you'll know it a bit sooner. You may be offered alternatives that will not
make you as late, such as a seat in a carpool or a portion of the trip on a train. (You'll get
to and from that train with robotaxis or services like Uber.)

Policies for priority

The city could give preference to certain vehicles, giving them either lower prices, or assured
wins in the lottery. These could include:

Transit vehicles, vans and sufficiently full carpools. (This would replace the carpool lane, in fact.)

People having an emergency and using one of a limited set of "silver bullets" they get every month to get priority.

Those who lost the lottery too much in recent times.

In a world where those who carpool or ride in small electric cars get guaranteed fast commutes at the
most popular times, and those who want to ride solo in a Hummer have to take alternate routes,
what sort of vehicles are we likely to see on the road more?

This approach also solves one of the greatest dilemmas that road planners have, known as
[[w:induced demand]. It's often noticed that after an expensive project expands a freeway or even
builds a new one, the reduction in congestion only lasts a modest amount of time. Soon everybody
starts rerouting to the new road, and they even start building more houses in places that use it
because of the nice commute. Soon it's just as congested as the old roads. With metering, you
never allow more cars on the road than it can handle. Roads will induce demand, but never more
than they can take.

The city can also set policy about what roads get the traffic. If the city decides to not hand out
too many slots for commuters on quiet residential streets with political donors living on them, it can do that.
There will be a political
battle between the local users of those streets and the fact that the city can use them to add
new capacity to the commute network effectively for free, saving the broader tax base a fortune.

It is worth noting this would reduce the need for things like speed bumps and other forms of traffic calming, which nobody likes. If a city blocks or limits commuter use of non-arterial streets, there may be less need for traffic calming, though there may still be a desire to slow down even the locals. Things like Portugal's velocidade controlada lights are a better idea.

Accidents

There is interesting potential to also improve what happens after accidents or other surprises. Of course, these apps could report accidents immediately, and the system could begin immediately rerouting traffic approaching the accident -- as we ask our mobile apps to do already. There is the problem of who gets to keep on the road and who gets rerouted. This could involve money (this might be politically more acceptable for special situations) or another lottery. The lottery could reward all the things already described, or it could even include factors like a demonstrated ability to not rubberneck and stay safe. Robocars of course would be great at that. Instead of money, the city could also offer rewards to those who accept a delay, like extra silver bullets or assured lottery wins in future. Some slop to handle accidents would be built into the system, but unusual events would make people late, but not as late as they make them today.

How to make this work?

The cheapest way to do this would be to have the phone enforce the route -- it knows where you are
and can see if you divert from your reserved route. This approach has many problems, but the
biggest one is that our phones must work for us, not against us. If we try to make them work
against us, people will quickly hack them to stop that, and then the phones will have to fight
that and it's a battle which nobody wins. In addition, this (and many other methods) have
some serious privacy problems.

A better option could be random enforcement. Randomly located cameras or transponders could look at
cars going past. If your car goes down a street where it doesn't have a slot it may get
photographed and you will get a ticket. To protect privacy, the law should require that all other
records are erased as soon as the slot has passed. To do an even better job, it may be possible
to design protocols so that your phone can be pinged over bluetooth or a similar protocol, and it can
provide credentials that show it has a reservation for the road it's on. If it can't, a photo is taken
and a fine issued.

Another option is to use rewards instead of punishment. Those who agree to obey the system get perks, like access to special lanes, parking, bridges, licence fee discounts, parking or more. Ideally an irresistible set of perks would get almost everybody into the system. Note that a growing proportion of drivers are already obeying navigation tools simply because they promise to find the fastest route.

Being flexible

People are not automatons, however. They need to be able to drive without planning, or deal
with surprise situations. They need to be able to make mistakes, missing turns. They need to be
able to make unplanned stops. Outside of peak times, there is plenty of capacity to handle that,
but at rush hour we would want to plan to tolerate a reasonable amount, but not have people
routinely drive outside their reservation.

To help with that, every driver would get some number of "silver bullets" that they could use when
they need to break the rules. You could use one of your bullets to get a fastest route, or change
a route. To make an emergency trip or an unplanned or different than expected stop. To not make
a trip that you reserved, since there will also be a penalty for that. Everybody should
get enough bullets to make sure they don't have to worry too much about mistakes and surprises, but
not enough to abuse. We might give more silver bullets to parents of young children or others who
are likely to have surprises. The number can be fine tuned with time.

This system will also have some slop built in. If you miss your window by a small amount, you
probably won't get a ticket. You'll get a warning, perhaps, and try to do better. Of course if
traffic causes everybody to be delayed, or go faster than expected, the system will know that
and adjust routes and not penalize.

People would of course get special access to their own local roads. You won't get barred from
driving the streets close to your house or office, though a longer trip might be denied on
some roads.

The system would not even apply off-peak. Your phone will know. It might be nice if there were
a way to activate it during unusual situations as well, such as storms or traffic caused by
major accidents or other surprises. Here, phones could wake up and alert people and request
routes, but the routes might be only advisory unless people agree to them (possibly for a reward
like more silver bullets.) That's because some people may not have their phone on when off peak.
Of course, car computers with this function would always receive the word.

There may be roads in central districts that are always congested (or which are extra congested at the lunch peak) which merit the use of this system all day.

Not everybody has a smartphone -- yet, or always

This is true, but may not be true for long. Pretty much all phones sold before too long will have
smartphone abilities. More to the point, eliminating congestion is so hugely valuable, that it's
easy to justify subsidizing smartphones that can do this (and perhaps little else) to those who can't
afford or don't want a smartphone. In addition, providing a free data plan good for this and nothing
else is a quite reasonable thing a city or country could negotiate with providers.

Of course, phones are lost, data plans max out, phones break and batteries die. The batteries should
not be a big issue as long as the car has a charger or a backup battery, but you want backup plans for
any situation. The system would work from any computer or phone, letting you print out your route or giving you
an easy to remember route that you can jot on paper. And finally,
you could use a silver bullet to drive without routing, using any computer or voice phone you can get
your hands on to declare this.

While this is something better to have in a phone, many cars would surely implement this service in their
car infotainment systems. I also expect that many people will keep one of their old phones in
their car, ready to boot up and do the job if their phone fails. (Again, the data plan usable only for this will
be free for your old phone.)

Visitors to town who can't download the smartphone app could rent
(or even be given, with a deposit) phones with plans at various stores on the way in
and out of town. This is already done in many cities that have special electronic tolling systems.
And yes, visitors could be given a bit of forgiveness as well. Their out-of-town licence plates could
be given a pass on their first few days in town.

Other exceptions

I noted above that this system gives cities tremendous power to offer preferential treatment
to some vehicles, in particular multi-person vehicles and efficient, low emissions vehicles.
This has been tried with carpool lanes, but that approach wasn't enough. Managed traffic, with
no special lanes, can do a lot more.

Here are just a few things that could get rewarded:

The more people in the carpool, the more reward. A 4-pool can get better routing than a 2-pool.

You can insist that carpool be "real," which is to say contain multiple (potential) car owners from different addresses, and give fewer points to couples riding together, or parents with a kid, who get carpool rights today even though they don't actually take a car off the road.

You could reward low-emission vehicles, or even calculate the emissions per person to give super rewards to 4 people riding an electric car.

Of course public transit vehicles and private ones (vanpools, etc.) could get very high reward.

People who ride transit could forward an electronic transit receipt to get more commute points. This would encourage people to mix transit with car commuting, since if they drive every day they get poor routes, but if they drive only 3 days/week, perhaps they get better routes those 3 days. Telecommuting could also be rewarded.

You could go even further and take away points from big gas-guzzler personal trucks with solo drivers.

Moving into dangerous abuse territory, cities could award commute priority points for things other than efficient road use; they could become a valuable urban currency. I call this dangerous because the temptation is high to do this and it would detract from the goal of improving traffic.

Carpooling would require all poolers to register as in the pool. Registering in the pool means you
are not driving your car on this trip, and you must have a car or a carpooler certificate (given
also to those who declare they could own a car but decided not to because of the ability to carpool.)
AI tools in the enforcement cameras would confirm the car appeared to have the number of
occupants promised -- this is now technically fairly feasible, and humans can inspect images that
confuse the AI. This is how HOT lane enforcement is done today. One could imagine fancy tools
where the carpoolers send radio signals at the enforcement points, but for now I want to avoid
that.

Economics

Charging people for use of the roads is politically challenging, but an interesting concept
from the electric utility world offers one solution. Power lines are not unlike highway lanes, and
during peak load times, there is not enough capacity for all. In exchange for lower electricity
rates, some companies agree they can be shut off during overloads. It could be possible, when
charging road or vehicle taxes, to offer a lower rate, if the car owner volunteers that from time to time,
they might be asked to take an alternate route, even if they already won a good one. (They would
get a few emergency exceptions for when their travel is critical, but if not in a hurry, they
could pause or reroute and take a bit more time.)

Too much control (and other issues)

In some ways, this system might give cities too much control over the roads. The temptation to
meet political goals might well end up corrupted or abused. Mayors, city employees or influential
parties might get more access to the roads than ordinary folk. The same interests that put speed
bumps and traffic calming would go hog wild for the chance to get all those "bad people" off "their"
roads. In spite of all efforts, the rich and powerful will find some ways to cheat or bias the
system. Cities desperate for tax revenue, finding little solace in existing taxes on cars and
gasoline, might love a new opportunity. Fads of public planning could turn into reality very
quickly.

These systems generally require the state or national agency which licences cars if you want to fine cars from outside your city. As such, the larger governments will be the one setting the main policies and settling political battles.

Other road charging systems have been subverted in the past. Some places allow only cars with odd
licence plates to drive odd numbered weekdays, and vice versa. The rich just make sure to buy two
cars, one of each parity. That doesn't work here, as long as not using a slot after requesting it
comes with a cost. The system would need to adapt to these and other hacks.

This is one of several issues that need more exploration. Related to this is the danger to privacy. Without care, this becomes a way to track and control
every drive in the city, possibly every ride. Some other issues include:

While most commuters have schedules of when they must be somewhere, there are those who need more flexibility. We want was to give it to them, but here money might be more acceptable politically

As noted, people will figure ways to try to cheat this, and countermeasures that don't destroy privacy are needed

This sort of system precludes significant speeding, in that you can't arrive way too early for your reservation slot. This may tempt governments into using it as a tool to rigidly enforce speed limits outside of rush hour, which is a big change in the dynamic. (During rush hour speed limits are usually not meaningful.)

Any centralized system has a risk of failure. Of course, the "failure mode" of this system is the world we drive in every day today, but once we got used to a well working system of uncongested roads, the reality is that shutting the system off would cause worse traffic than we have now. Absent failure of the mobile data network, the private apps would still do their best to guide drivers, but that would not be enough.

No doubt more will come up in the comments

New infrastructure

Such complete control over the road use offers the chance for much better use of existing
infrastructure. It becomes possible in time to do things like redirect roads to be one-way
in the peak direction, even before robocars. The lack of congestion could seriously increase
capacity as well. In time, though, demand grows, and too many people can't get quick routes
where they are going, and you want new infrastructure.

As noted above, this solves the induced demand problem of building new roads, but it also lets us
get a lot more out of our roads. In the extreme, a city could mandate very heavy carpooling, vanpooling
and bus riding. The inconveniences of such pooling -- which will get less and less with
smartphone technology, high ridership, transfer points, Uber style services and eventually robocars -- would be
easily compensated for by that predictable and uncongested commute. The reality is that our roads have immense
capacity if you fill most of the seats. We're talking 3 times more capacity just filling the car seats and much
more if you fill vans and buses. That's far greater than the capacity of any transit system, and it's free.

On to robocars

This proposal is designed for human drivers, but robocars will be even better at it. They will have
fewer accidents, drive in very rational manners and reliably understand and follow directions. They will
allow parking lanes to be cleared and converted to traffic lanes, and roads to be temporarily converted to
one way in the peak direction. They will make pooling much more pleasant
and be more predictable in their travel times. They will even let people switch vehicles, allowing somebody in
a solo vehicle to switch to pooling to help when traffic gets too thick.

A world with minimal congestion is a marvelous robocar world. It's a world of short, predictable travel
times between places. It's a world where it's very easy to combine people together when they are going the
same way to make transportation efficient and cheap. Visions like the neighbourhood elevator I described for smooth medium density living become possible.
It permits the ideal city that mixes walking, cycling and
short convenient electric car trips that put an entire city of people, jobs, shops, recreation and more at
your fingertips -- most of what people like from dense cities, without many of the issues people don't like about
density. This does not mean nothing goes wrong, but it's much closer to an urban utopia than has been possible
before.

The Connected Car?

My regular readers will know I am a general skeptic of "connected car" plans, yet this is an example of one. What makes it
different?

The only connection needed is getting a smartphone into every car, something that's already happening. That's very different from plans that require new gear built into every car.

The connection is over the mobile data networks, which already exist and are getting better. There are no new protocols or need for line-of-sight communications or extra infrastructure.

In theory, each city can have a different system if it wants, in fact multiple bordering towns can even have their own reservation systems as long as the navigation apps know how to deal with that. So there is not nearly as much need for standardization -- and much more room for innovation.

Reservation slots will be minutes long, so special real-time protocols are not required.

The connection is to the phone, not the car, or if in the car, to an isolated infotainment section, so there are not the security risks of having a connection to safety related systems. Robocars will require that connection, but they need it anyway since they still want to do traffic based navigation like everybody else.

If transponders are used, they also can be isolated from all safety systems.

Much simpler -- allocating departure time

Others have proposed much simpler plans than this, simply allocating departure times for people based on their commute. Given knowledge of a commute, there are really only a limited set of roads a person is likely to take, and so you can manage road space to some degree just by making some people leave earlier or later. In addition, if you did that, most people would use tools like Waze, but it would not be compulsory to take their routes. They would balance traffic somewhat, though.

Comments

"You could go even further and take away points from big gas-guzzler personal trucks with solo drivers."

Taking away ALL points from anyone driving a car which uses more fuel than absolutely necessary, such as SUVs, pickups, vintage cars, low-riders, etc, would save a huge amount.

As for accidents, I recently read the number of 32,000 traffic fatalities per year in the USA. Germany has about a quarter of the population, but an area smaller than Texas, and no speed limit on much or even most of the Autobahn (which has about 20 per cent of the travelled kilometres)---and has about 2000 traffic fatalities per year. So it seems that this number could be brought down quite a bit even without new technology. (Germany also has about 100 murders per year, but that's another story.)

Road pricing can be a strong mechanism for improving efficiency, although the public are often distrustful.(I would be skeptical of a lottery system due to the lack of flexibility).

A few random points based on driverless mobility services:

. Make the standard rate the highest rate so that only discounts are offered and there are no surcharges.
. Offer decent discounts for off peak travel, smaller vehicle size, avoiding congested areas, more variation in pick up time etc...
. Always give an instant estimated cost before the journey is booked. People absolutely hate bill shock from unexpectedly high charges.
. Keep it simple by only taxing CO2 emissions. Then let the market sort out vehicle CO2 emissions. Heavy vehicles running on clean energy are not inherently a problem from an environmental POV.
. Reduce induced demand by offering substantial discounts for shorter trips. Perhaps a simple requirement that the first 5 miles must be charged at 1/2 price? This could be seen as a type of congestion charge that encourages decisions resulting in shorter commutes.
.Make the equations that the trip cost are calculated on visible to the public on the apps used to order the ride.
.Have strong privacy requirements so that all data collected has individual identifiers stripped out after a day or two as the default setting.

The basic economics of road pricing is that it allows price signals to cover problems that traditionally we have just had to put up with because we had no other way of efficiently discouraging them.

Because governments build and maintain the roads, it makes sense for them to set the cost and policy for their use, though politically this has been difficult. Likewise it makes sense for them to tax externalities like emissions.

Unless I read you wrong you seem to be suggesting governments might govern the cost of a ride, which I don't think is a good idea -- other than that the cost of the road is part of the cost of a ride.

At the same time, while the cost of the roads can go up, it can't and won't get ridiculous. Most toll roads still charge no more than pennies to dimes per mile. (Bridges charge more.)

I do think costs will be pretty predictable. In fact, the main thing that will make costs unpredictable is traffic, since it can mean you will have to go further or take more time and somebody has to pay for that.

I was not trying suggest that governments set the cost of the rides, instead I am trying to think of ways for fair and efficient cost recovery.

My comments on pricing are suggestions on how governments could improve cost recovery based on the user pays principal. At present we have a lot of broad scale taxation that hits everyone equally even though our road usage is very unequal. A loser at present could be a retiree who uses their vehicle only a couple of times a week for short trips. They are in effect subsiding someone who chooses to live on the other side of the city from where they work and then drives on a daily basis.

There is little incentive at present not to make decisions that can be very wasteful. This is often why the curse of induced demand renders some very expensive road upgrades useless over quite short periods of time. My suggestion of mandating a price mechanism into fares to discourage congestion was an attempt to address this. Mandating that the first 5? miles is discounted against longer distances is admittedly a very crude attempt to encourage people to think carefully about travel distances when making major decisions on where to apply for work and live. I am very open to other ideas but have seen few suggestions.

I believe it is unwise to have governments pick solutions when the market would do it. More to the point, if the market would pick a different solution from the law, with externalities fully priced in, why would we prefer the governmental one?

The problem though is that roads are not that expensive. We would want to price them at their fair cost, but what would that be? In most states, the tolls are under 10 cents/mile. What will we argue is the real cost?

At costs in the dimes/mile range, what does this mean? If a solo car would pay $2 in road costs for a 10 mile commute, would they really accept the inconveniences of carpooling to make it $1.10 each for 2, or 70 cents each for 3? It's not enough saving to bend behaviour.

Of course, if it's an auction, it's a different story because at rush hour the price would get very high, and people would think much more seriously about pooling. In fact, auction rates at rush hour should actually get so high that the price can be free outside of rush-hour, which is how it should be, since most capacity is built for the peak.

Companies will only pay externalities if they have to. Yet external costs can be huge and incredibly hard to measure. An extreme case would be the external health costs of air pollution in China and the great difficulty of trying to measure and proportion the costs back to the polluters who cause it.

Trying to measure the true costs of induced demand causing ongoing suffocating road congestion is just as difficult. How many human hours are wasted sitting in traffic? What are the health and environmental costs? I certainly support a market based approach and a healthy number of companies competing in the marketplace, however they will avoid all external costs that they can keep off their books, that is what bean counters and lobbyists are paid for.

The challenge to me what are the simplest possible mechanisms the government can use to ensure that these real external costs are not avoided and transferred to others to pay for. Some attempts to reduce demand at critical times do not seem very efficient: odd/Even number plates on certain days, fix area surcharges, clearways at peak times, or the most common method, do nothing and let the sheer frustration of congestion itself be the control.

I wouldn't see a requirement for a congestion charge to be built into the pricing system to be much different than the recovery of other statutory fees and charges.

I do support having road users pay the true cost of road use, and fuel users paying the true cost of fuel use. I am less fond of artificial increases over the true cost because we have a history of getting it wrong.

The issue is that the true cost isn't that bad. People find that cost well worth it in exchange for the convenience, privacy and comfort of private transportation. They would find even higher costs worth it, or at least most people would. I mean we subsidize transit tickets immensely and still, most people pick the more expensive private transport.

The difference robocars bring, by the way, is that they can make sharing much more convenient. Sharing vehicles is much more efficient, that's the whole reason for transit today, but that's not enough as long as sharing is inconvenient. You can try to make people share by bumping the price, but you do even more if you make it more pleasant. Or both.

That's with a pure price. With a lottery (which is my #2 choice though I spend a lot of time on it in the article) you take advantage of the human psychology of gambling. "Share and win for sure" vs. "Go private and win only some of the time" is more appealing than "Share and pay 1/3 price" I think.

It is not necessary to waste time and money to deploy systems, hardware, software, to help people drive safely and faster. In not more than 10 years it will be possible to have enough robocars, to substitute all cars and trucks worldwide. Once robocars are driving alone, without any man drive vehicle (except bicycles),in an area, the benefits in near no casualities, less space to run and park, plus all the advantages that a car who can pick up and left any person, where and when he wants and not matter his age or knowledge about driving ,will erase any inconvenient, even fatalities that robocars could causes.

We're not likely to replace all cars with robocars for many decades, and in some areas of the world, for many more decades. So it does not make sense to make many plans about an all robocar world quite yet. An all smartphone world, on the other hand, is imminent.

In one sense I agree with you. But this is, sorry, the old way to see the things: low speed of the change. In 10 years public telephones disappeared from Tokyo. Today, you cannot live without a mobile, unless you are Amish (I think they are right,but.....). The analog HDTV went from the factory to the museum,ready to hit a market that never touched. Whats about Amazon online SM?. Why new cables for telephone lines, that will not use anymore?
Worldwide RC is possible.
There are 1.2 billions vehicles, and about 100 millions are make every year, so to make 1.2 billions RC in 10 years is possible, OK?. And an all smartphone world is imminent, right?, That is the 2 things we need for a WW RC. Make only RC, substitute area by area , send the good cars to other areas that need time to adapt to RC, or where are still needed, because not more 0Km. cars. For some areas must be some RC than will be full RC in cities and roads but can be man driving off roads.
People will ask to forbid man driving.
How many people died in the world trade center? What we did after that? . How many people died every year in car accidents, what we can do?. Once RC probe not to kill people unless it has an accident because a Human Driving Vehicle, people will be afraid to drive or travel in HDV. Who makes more accidents? forbid before 25 and after 60 (me, after driving in 40 countries, both sides of the road). Had an accident? no more license for the rest of your life. Easily 50 % of drivers will lost her license, because more strict rules.
RC will change the way we use a car, and will make changes in our life schedule.
How many cars need today a family, and even the schoolbus needs to come to pick up children, and granma needs take a bus because nobody has time to take her to her friends house . No more buses, no more taxis (sorry Uber),no more cars in a family, no more learn to drive , nearly no more deaths because a car. Everybody will be independent to move, not needs somebody to help, from 2 to 120 years old. Will be a incredible change in our life.All family can go together to see the circus, just arriving at time, everybody from different points.
Let first RC change the life then will see if will want and need special RC for some reasons.
Brad Your blog is wonderful, do not want to brake rules, can I write more details about deployment by areas?. Thanks

I have gone all over the world and talked to many people, and I am pretty confident that even if it's easy to switch all the cars over (which it isn't) there will be strong pressure, particularly from the more politically powerful middle-aged, to not change so quickly. And there isn't a really compelling reason, from the viewpoint of too many, to force it through.

The most I see happening is that people who do have accidents might lose the right to drive, or people who get too many tickets, or in extreme cases, people who can't pass a real skill test (instead of the fake driving test we do now.)

politically powerful middle-aged, after 60 years old, will be not allow to drive. May be not in the first 5 years of RC deployment, but sure after follow many casualties because them. So they will be the most interested to have a good, cheap, always ready, RC float.
One sample
In Auckland, not many people was interested to go, and so not many people was taking holidays going by ferry, to the other side of the bay. In 1959 they finished building a bridge, so they discovered why not many people was not going through the bay: because there were no bridge. 5 years later the bridge cannot manage the 3 times bigger amount of cars that supposed to go when the bridge was planed. They added so, 2 lines more , at a very high price that if it was made originally.
Why not pilot plan cities?
We can ask, worldwide, which towns and small cities or any city area, want to have full RC there. Then make necessary modifications, teach people and deploy RC.

""The most I see happening is that people who do have accidents might lose the right to drive, or people who get too many tickets, or in extreme cases, people who can’t pass a real skill test (instead of the fake driving test we do now.)""
I wrote that and agree with you, Brad, and what that people will do?,take an expensive human man drive taxi, than can kill him?, go to the factories and dealers pledging for more RC that they cannot afford?.
Things WILL BE DIFFERENT, we MUST think different NOW.
Thanks Brad, is good to argue with you.make me think more.

So it DOES MAKE sense to make many plans about an all robocar world NOW, to avoid:
1)Lost a opportunity to take quick all advantages of RC.
2)Have a lot of trouble and accidents because interaction between RC and cars.
3)have social unrest and higher prices, because few people could access a RC.
4)have accidents because RC are not receiving the proper, necessary repairs and updates, because same style of today business.

1) Only pedestrians, bicycles, robocars in an area.
2) Enough RC for all the people usually being in the area, living, working, shopping, touring, etc.
3) All necessary RC must be deploy in few days, and take away the man driving vehicles.
4) The city council, the dealer, the factory, a pool money from citizens, a loan from a bank, etc, can pay for the RC, is not the subject of the point.
5) Everybody will have an ID and ID account. A user will pay for the time he use the RC(from his ID account). In a shared trip,the import of the time shared, will be divided between users.
6) All the money collected from the ID accounts because the use of RC, will be used to return the money to whom “paid” for the RC, and for RC repairs, charging battery, etc. and to “buy” RC in the future.
7) An area can rent RC from other area if needed (sport event, etc)
8) A user can “own” a RC forever, or a period. A group of users can make a club, “owning” several RC, only allow to be used by club members, follow the club rules. In both cases the time “owned” will be pay for the “owners” ID account. The fare to “own” a RC can be different to the fare used time. Also can be 2 fares for using and for waiting time. In all cases, a RC “owned” can be let call and used for other users that will pay to the “owners” ID account .
9) In all cases, RC services, repairs, charging batteries, insurance, parking areas, will run outside any responsibility of the users ,even the “owners”. Some board (dealer, factory, city council, HAL 2001) will be in charge.
10) Will be good that this type of RC, instead or besides a normal charging battery system, has an easy change battery, than can be replaced in 2 min for a robot arm, in some designated places where RC can go fast and easily. Even, if batteries need to be changed, more often than big batteries need to be charged, each RC will be near all time ready to be used. This will save, time, money and battery life.
Everybody can call and use RC.

1) Everybody (from 2 years old to 120) must have at least 1 simple, cheap, free, robocall mobile phone (RMP). User’s RPM, is basically designed for call RC, and must have GPS. Other functions can be added. RPM, assure that everybody never will run out of battery and will be easy to use. Everybody must have RPM, even tourist. RPM must be taken as easy as a phone card.
2) RMP has an ID associated with his owner. Some basic information, name, address, age, personal details (3 years old, blind, etc), supervisor ID (if necessary) must be in a Data Center.
3) A simple push (not dialing, talking, writing, choose options) will be send to the DC, telling where is the User and his ID. DC will look the info, and follow instructions, like call or send a message to the supervisor. Also will send to the User, visual and audible info about when the RC will pick up him/her.
4) RC arrives, User is recognized by RC (face camera, fingerprint, RMP ID). User takes RC, RC send a message to supervisor, drive User to the destination.
5) Normal User, who do not need supervisor, can call, reserve place and time, change destination in the way, any appl.possibility, etc, using a normal mobile phone too. A supervisor can planned the trip in the same way for his supervised (like his little child).

Brad, Just I read "The Neighbourhood Elevator", I agree about many things, plus what you say about the future with robocars (like I was reading my think).
Just add few things.
No more schools, secondary schools,gym, shopping centers, museums. Everything together in an area call Cultural Divulgation Center (CDC), open 365 days from sun rise to sun set(actually Shopping center, casinos, burdels, gas stations did, why not schools?). Some things can be open until a little later, only a little. (human being MUST sleep at night).
The actual education centers will be a mix of actual schools and interactive museums. No more academic years, work days and holidays.
Access from 3 to 120 years
No academic years, Just interactive experience, lessons, curriculum, subjects to follow.
Interactive learning, group tasks, of course will held at CDC, other things can be follow either at CDC or at home through internet,
A card ID will give track of all students moves and studies. A teacher can then follow an help students.
This type of CDC, will be very important in some countries where students are actually not follow normal schools, plus a huge amount of people in all countries that are, and will be more in the future , out of the knowledge advances. Everybody can study , learn what they want plus follow his own speed, without stop because the lazies or lost the train of the others.
Other things
Residential areas will be residential areas, with no more than 10 min robocar access to CDC
Will not make more details, but of course the CDC will be side by side with Gyms,etc plus shopping and cinema area. Inside people walk, bikes, small RC.
Do not forget, many things will be done from home (studying, working, shopping, chatting), so the actual displacement of people will be change a lot in the future, and RC will be the main thing that will help with this.